Application configuration is a time-consuming and expensive process with many manual steps. Additionally, an application configuration process is required in many applications such as automated application deployment and management (troubleshooting), application reinstallation during migration to a cloud environment, etc. It is possible to automate some steps in the process that work at the operating system level, but application-dependent steps require manual efforts (driven by ad hoc scripts). Consequently, application configuration is typically performed by experts, contributing to additional cost associated with the process.
Cloud computing presents a model to automatically deploy workloads using standard templates. However, in existing approaches, reconfiguring an application to work in a new environment remains manual and time-consuming.
Accordingly, a need exists to automatically identify configuration files in a new target virtual machine (VM) independent of the application and reconfigure the files with desired values for points of variability (PoVs).